1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technology for acquiring an electronic document through a network and printing an image using the acquired electronic document.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the past, there is a technology for scanning, in copying paper having point information indicating an address and the like of a server printed thereon as a barcode, the paper as an image (a scan image) with a scanner and scanning the barcode printed on the paper, accessing the server corresponding to the address indicated by the point information obtained by decoding the barcode, and acquiring an electronic document printed on the paper as an image (see, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2005-151127). The acquisition of the electronic document is performed by extracting a characteristic of the scanned scan image and retrieving an electronic document stored in the server using the extracted characteristic. For example, due to a change in a connection environment of a location or the like of the server on a network, it may be impossible to access the server corresponding to the address indicated by the point information. In such a case, the electronic document is retrieved out of electronic documents stored in all servers connected to an image processing system using the characteristic extracted from the scan image.
In the technology disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2005-151127, when the connection environment such as the location of the server on the network is changed, it is likely that the server corresponding to the address indicated by the point information cannot be accessed and the server itself cannot be specified. Even if the server in which the electronic document printed on the paper as the image is stored can be uniquely specified, the electronic document is retrieved using the characteristic of the scan image. Therefore, it is likely that it takes a lot of time to retrieve the electronic document. A plurality of electronic documents similar to the characteristic extracted from the processing object electronic document may be obtained as a retrieval result. Therefore, it is likely that the electronic document printed on the paper as the image cannot be uniquely specified.